Category Archives: Non Fiction

Had we been mass-produced through purple screens and amethyst light, we would have been all alike. And faultless– to the point, that each, would be faulty of being so.
But the inconsistency of this block print– the overlaps, the mash-ups, the experimental, unexpected colours, even those pure bits that remain uncoloured and white– speak of how we were made. (Each with love, each with His own hands, each at a different point in time).
And that is why the inconsistency shouldn’t bother.
It’s unique.
For each.
Because that is how, together, we make a fabric so beautiful.

I think I met Melchizedek right outside the Nagpur airport one morning, after a short trip home this July. He was dressed like one of the security guards- in khaki, hiding boredom just like the guards did behind a strict, no-nonsense expression and ample moustache.

I handed him my ticket printout and the driving licence. He peered at it, then at me. At it. At me. At it. At me.

‘I know. That’s more than five years old. I looked different. The pic’s mine.’

I always over-explain, yes, often before the need arises to.

‘You have a lovely name.’ His eyes didn’t leave the driving licence.

What a creep.

I gave a half-smile that hardly thanked him, and pretended to observe a bawling baby on a cart in the parallel queue.

‘Do you know what it means, Vaidehi?’

I provided the automatic answer. ‘It’s one of the names of Goddess Sita. Derived from Videha. Her father.’

He smiled, handing me back the licence. At this point I noticed his eyes- brown, shiny and deep. To my shock-surprise, he patted my head. ‘That it is. But what does it mean?’ His gaze was penetrating and held a hint of mischief.

I knew the meaning but thought he would not understand it even if I told him. Prejudice born from growing up in an environment where engineers are considered more brainy than designers.

He spoke. ‘It means one who has risen above and beyond the body and self. Vi-deha. Vi = beyond. Deha = body. Transcending beyond the body. Remember that.’ I must have looked really dumb with my mouth open, because my hair was promptly tousled and I was asked with a smile to move into the lobby beyond.

The past few weeks had been bad in a number of ways. I was cribbing a great deal about the unfairness dealt out to me by fate. Most importantly, I had not asked for help, to myself or others. The daily meditation was not being practiced when I needed it most.

I must have attracted this reminder. Unlike Santiago in The Alchemist, I wasn’t handed any decision-making stones, but the reminder was good enough. The first thing I did on boarding the flight was meditate. The rest would follow.

If you do, it’s a snack better than the best sodium monoglutamate-coated chips (a snake, if you are from Ahmedabad). If you don’t, it’s an evil brown salty, powder-coated pill of something horrendously sour that smells like fart and you wouldn’t want one on your tongue, thank you very much. If you are one of the latter, stay away.

Hand-pulled stalls with piles of churan greet enthusiasts and non alike near Ranino Hajiro in the winding old city of Ahmedabad. At this junction where the road parts into trinket and fabric lanes, vata-kapha body types (I believe pitta people do not much care for sour) treat themselves with a variety of mukhwas.

There are the bite-y ones for those who are hungry– dried, ripe mangoes coated in jeera-sugar-salt mix. The same base enveloped in a mixture with red chilli powder added. Then there’s anardana. Ah, anardana. How much I miss it, the dried pomegranate pods encased in some mysterious punchy magical churan-powder, to be rolled on the tongue till the packet’s over and the skin from the ceiling of the mouth begins to peel. And a more royal relative of it, the gulkand-added version. Gulkand– the king of all things sweet, the best way a rose can present itself. And the king of them all, the chhuhara. The best date.

Then there are the less bite-y ones, the particular brand of blighters that give you a kick in the mouth and later in the belly- the asafoetida ingrained hingwati, or the evil tamarind laddoos that make you wink. Or the Amla suparis and jeera golis. Deadly ammunition all, against boredom, lack of appetite, melancholy and possibly e-coli.

Taste each first, sample them all. If possible, from every stall. There are subtle differences from vendor-to-vendor. Like wine, different kind of pomegranates and different varieties of mangoes yield different tastes with the same churan powder. Watch out for the overly moist, the overly salty, and the worst of all, the overly sweet.

Choose well. Learn the art. Appreciate the taste, the after-taste. It’s a quirk few have, a knack not many possess; the ability to gobble these sour-sweet-salty pellets, these smack-y, hard-hitting bullets.

Flaunt your passion. Boo the weak-tongued, the weak-bellied who frown upon you.

Like this:

I hear the tinkle of metal.. the musical clanging that means the ceremony is about to begin. I hear the rustle of the dry leaves and smell the range of refreshing, heavenly perfumes emanating from them. I see the light that makes the sweet bits of sand shine like diamonds. I feel the warmth on my face, the warmth in which all of these revel. I stir the drink of nostalgia creating a whirlpool of memories. Thrice clock-wise, thrice anti-clockwise. I gingerly wait, watching the whirlpool transform into a bubbling volcano that finally erupts into a myriad of emotions that cloud the senses. I try and collect these.

Like this:

Hair today, gone tomorrow

It was a typical day in the studio… all fifteen of us (in the beginning, everyone attends all the classes) were trying to get the hang of a new assignment we were asked to finish by the next day. It was a lovely evening. Most of the big studios in NID, including the graphic design, face the beautiful front lawns. With my limited knowledge of both colleges and peacocks, I would like to believe that no institute in the world can boast of these birds roaming freely in their premises. In NID, they are all over the place.. studios, lawns, rooftops, ledges… I once found a peahen in the washroom.

Some of us got watching a handsome peacock with its tail fanned out, trying to impress a passing peahen. Soon nearly everyone was fooling around, and the assignment got pushed to a particular compartment of the brain that functions only after a plate of Maggi, 4-5 cups of tragic night mess chai, random visits to people’s rooms, and a tiny panic attack, all after two a.m.

It was an ill-timed comment made by a friend in the midst of our frolicking about my ‘grown all over the place-need a haircut asap’ hair that started it all. The remark had something to do with the structure a peacock has on its head. I say ill-timed because it was six pm and also the beginning of July, which means that Ahmedabad was getting its first monsoon rains accompanied by a weather that makes rain-crazy people like me go mad with happiness. This weather brings on a mood that makes the victim look at the fellow inhabitants with greatly magnified affection and trust. In that particular mood, I agreed stupidly to a seemingly kind offer by a friend, Devika. She wanted to give me a haircut, there and then (not to mention that it would be free of cost, though that was not what made me go ahead with the offer, I like to blame it on the monsoon). I could have said, ‘No, thank you very much but I’ll get it done this weekend at the place I regularly go to..’ but no, I said instead, ‘Hey! that would be cool!’ and even fetched a pair of scissors from my locker.

I do not wish to recount the hour-long haircut session that followed. The only thing I remember is realizing with every snip, the absence of a mirror in the graphic design studio. Remember the fable of the two cats fighting over a cake they find and a supposedly well-wishing, helpful monkey? In the tale, the monkey divides the cake into two parts for the cats. On finding one piece bigger than the other, he eats a chunk out of the bigger piece to make them equal. Due to a supposed error in judgement, he accidentally makes the erstwhile bigger piece smaller. Repeating the process, he ends up eating the entire cake while the cats get nothing. Well let’s just say that my hair was the cake and Devika the monkey (ah! here’s my little revenge..). What I mean to convey through this bad analogy is that she kept on snipping off a tress here and a lock there to make them of the same length meanwhile reducing the overall length to dangerous limits. If a good friend hadn’t given that look of horror I remember so well to this day, I would not have had much hair left at the end of the exercise! I immediately made Devi stop so that I could make a quick visit to the washroom mirror and review the damage.

Being an optimist, I tried telling myself things like ‘hair grows, it will be long in no time!’ , ‘it doesn’t look so bad after all…’ , ‘people around me will get used to this in a few days’ and most importantly, ‘I will get used to it in a few days.’ I felt slightly better and re-emerged out of the washroom, feeling a trifle bit more confident about the weird hairdo that I now showcased. A few friends I met on my way to the hostel politely chose not to give my hair too much attention. All seemed well till I passed the basketball court, where a senior we often interacted with, commented with concern but without delicacy. I think he did mention a scarecrow somewhere. Now optimism has its limits if you are a girl and have to survive a bad haircut! I rushed to my room and remained there for a long time.

I tend to think of worst case scenarios when I find myself in hopeless situations and pave a way out of them. It’s an algorithm I’ve realized has always worked: knowing what is the worst result of the hopeless situation I am in, knowing if I can deal with it and finally, dealing with it. More often than not, things are not as bad as they seem, it’s only a scarecrow comment that makes it all seem worse. After an hour of thought in the solitude of my room I realized it could have been worse… it’s only hair! It grows! I realized it was more a case of ‘I will look stupid in front of everyone with this hair.’ I was thinking more of what people around me would think. I was attaching too much importance to how I appeared in front of the surrounding public. So there! The mood immediately improved. The heavy rain that had started to fall outside added to the overall uplifting feeling. My newfound hate for Devika changed instantly into the affection I’d felt for her as a friend before this whole thing happened. I am now sure that her next victim would be more fortunate as she must have learned a thing or two as well. Recently, another friend did something new to my hair which was a good job done but I didn’t quite agree with it immediately and I had a tough time before I reminded myself that it could have been worse! Bad hair days and haircuts don’t bother me anymore. Nor does a pimple, or some irregularly chewed fingernails, or a dress that does not ‘go with’ my shoes, socks, eye colour or sun sign.

It’s a wonderful free feeling, to be able to ride my bike once in a while without a helmet just to feel the wind run through my hair; to not bind myself in layers of scarves and coats and gloves all the time and resemble a female extremist, scared of getting darker in the sun; and to not let trivial things like a bad hair day affect my happiness.

Originally appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Indian College Students, (2010)

I want to explore the Great African Rift valley with its great lakes, click (hopefully not the last) Virunga gorillas and imagine how the continent is cracking up at the fault line. I want to visualize the evolution of innumerable things, try to go back in past, into prehistory and beyond. Think how lions ended up in India or the lemurs in Madagascar. Imagine the time when the Congo and Amazon were one river and Africa and South America one. Explore along Chad’s dying lake shores that are shrinking fast. Interact with tribes before they become ‘civilized’ and start making traditional jewellery beads from colourful plastic. I wish to be in the Savannah hearing Cheetahs ‘bark’ before they vanish completely, pat an ostrich on its head at the risk of being chased and walked over, see a handsome giraffe against the backdrop of the Kilimanjaro. I wish to trek in the Ruwenzori, enjoy snow and avoid malaria. I want to check if the pygmies are really as short as described in one of the old schoolbooks. I wish to sit quietly beside lake Kiwu because it’s so beautiful.

I want to try Cassava bread or may be Ugali, even a cooked babboon brain if I could become a guest of the Hadzas, the supremely self-sufficient and therefore content people. I wish to ask the Dogons as to how in the world did they come to know about Sirius B (before they come to know all about the one in Harry Potter too) . I want to observe the clear unpolluted night sky lying down on a cold dune. I want to observe the ‘orangeness’ of the Orange river and redness of the Red sea. And how blue and white Niles are different. I wish to look into the mystic eyes of the great Sphinx and try to get some answers before it becomes headless apart from already being nose-less. I wish to observe the serenity of an elephant funeral.

I wish to laugh with a hyaena, avoid being trampled by thousands of wildebeests running for their lives ahead of a dutiful lioness, see chimps as they really are. I want to observe for myself the seemingly water-less life of the Bushmen, try and find what Mauritians think about the dodo. I want to figure how the word for lion sounds the same in Swahili and many Indian languages.

I wish to know the not-so-romantic side, the unwanted legacy of the colonial times, the plight of Somalia or the conflicts of the two Zs. I want to stand at the Cape of Good Hope and see both the Indian ocean and the Atlantic.